54 ARABIA INFELIX Sanaa road (winding up the lower limbs of Shibam) across a vast ravine that a baboon could not scale. Down this the telegraph-line stretches in long, sagging loops, the wire having been taken to the edge of the chasm, under the headland of Beh, and dropped sheer into the gulf, to be handled by Turkish sappers from below. Fort Hadar commands the other approaches to Menakha—mere goat-tracks, winding up from the valley of Shebt—and both forts dominate the town, which is almost overhung by the heights of Shibam, where there are also several armed posts. Beh is the gun-fort; it is there that a hulking howitzer broods in a circular nest of masonry, just peering clear of the edge down at the mountain-road and distant foot-hills eastward. Fear of that monstrous prodigy (dragged piecemeal from the coast) did much to keep Menakha inviolate in 1904-1905, when Sanaa fell and the Imam's followers, joined by outlawed hillsmen, were seething round the ridge to wrest the key of Yamen from the Turks. The insurgents shunned the open curves of the mountain-road as mere shambles under the Ottoman guns, and, after vain attempts to scale the vast ravines that run down on either hand from Menakha ridge, came swarming up the spurs, with the driving mist, to try conclusions with the forces of the Sultan. The local gendarmerie did yeoman service, then and on subsequent occasions, for they knew every inch of the ground and fought to guard their lives and homes. Short shrift would they and their's have had from their compatriots if Menakha had fallen. Night and day, in fog or sunshine, they grappled with their foes among the treacherous boulders of the upper heights, while above